June 18, 2013 - Darin Allen — It’s been almost a year since we first announced that we were developing a native version of Accordance for Windows, and the response has been very encouraging. We appreciate all of the excitement from the community, and we wanted to take a moment now to answer some of the most common questions we've received about Accordance for Windows. What is the current status of Accordance for Windows? The Windows version is quite far along at this point. We recently launched a closed beta on June 6, 2013 and we currently have about 25 beta ...

June 18, 2013 - David Lang — Not long ago I stumbled across a post on a Bible software forum that taught me a new word: "pangram." I had to Google it to find out that a pangram is a sentence that includes every letter of the alphabet. A classic example is that odd sentence used to display all the characters of a typeface: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The forum post I read cited Deuteronomy 4:34 and Zephaniah 3:8 as examples of pangrams in the Hebrew Bible, then asked how to find a pangram in the Greek New Testament or Septuagint. Now, I have no idea ...

June 17, 2013 - David Lang — < > In case you haven't heard, we're offering a new set of items for sale each week during the months of June and July. Last week's sale, which ends today, includes a must-have Hebrew lexicon (the unabridged BDB), and Hebrew grammars by Joüon-Muraoka and Waltke-O'Connor. Check the sale page each week to see a new set of deals.

June 03, 2013 - Helen Brown — Accordance 10.1.7 was released over the weekend, free of course to all users of Accordance 10 (MacAppStore users will need to wait a few days). The improvements and bug fixes are listed here. The Help files have also been revised and updated. Accordance for iOS 1.6.5 is now live in the App Store, with more bug fixes, and the improved display implemented in 1.6. GNT28-T.syntax is now available to work with the GNT28-T. It is a free upgrade for users who own the GNT-T.syntax, but must be ordered in our store. This module provides full ...

May 16, 2013 - Darin Allen — We are excited to announce that we just released the 28th Edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. The Nestle-Aland is the leading critical edition of the Greek New Testament used by scholars and seminary students all over the world. The 28th edition makes significant changes to the apparatus and uses the Editio Critica Maior as its basis for the Catholic letters (James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1-3 John, and Jude), so these letters will have textual differences from the NA27. Here are some details from the publisher on the changes they've ...

May 11, 2013 - David Lang — A while back, I started a series of posts on Accordance Preferences. So far, we've covered the General Settings (Part 1 and 2), the Appearance Settings, and the Workspace Settings. Now we're ready to tackle the Text Display Settings. This is where you can set the font, size, color, style, etc. of text in all your biblical and extrabiblical Text modules. But before I focus on all the specific options in this Preferences panel, let me give you an overview of the various ways you can change the appearance of a Bible text. Customizing the ...

April 24, 2013 - David Lang — Yesterday I talked about the Search menu, which conveniently lists everything you need to fill in a blank search box. Among the options in this menu are the various Search Commands in the Enter Command submenu. Today I'd like to point out something about that submenu: its divider line. This line divides the list of commands into two kinds, and we even have special names for them. The seven commands above the line are what we call connecting commands. The eleven commands below the line are known as stand-alone commands. Connecting ...

April 23, 2013 - David Lang — As a writer, I have often known the mockery of the blank page. It glares at you, laughing at your struggles to fill it with something meaningful. As Accordance users, we are constantly presented with a blank search box, ever ready to be put to use. Experienced users know exactly what to do with it, but new users may experience something of the mockery I feel when trying to fill a blank page. They may conceive of a search they would like to do, but how to construct it? They know Accordance is capable of much more than simple word and phrase ...

April 17, 2013 - David Lang — Monday, I wrote about a panel discussion at a recent conference which compared the use of the words βασιλεια (kingdom) and ευαγγελιον (gospel) in the Greek New Testament. To see the relevant data for myself, I did a search for βασιλεια ευαγγελιον, then chose Analysis Graph from the Stats and Graphs icon of the Search tab. I then chose to have the Analysis Graph break down this search by Lexical form (LEX). The resulting graph plotted the frequency of these two lexical forms across the entire New ...

April 15, 2013 - David Lang — Last week, I was busy exhibiting Accordance at the Gospel Coalition's National Conference here in Orlando. During a few of the sessions, I stepped away from the booth to listen to the speakers. One of these was a panel discussion entitled "Did Jesus Preach the Gospel?" In it Don Carson, Kevin DeYoung, Tim Keller, and John Piper discussed the distinction some interpreters make between the "gospel" that Paul preached and Jesus' own emphasis on the coming of the "kingdom." It was a lively, interesting, and collegial discussion. The speakers all ...

April 12, 2013 - David Lang — This is the fourth in a series of posts on Accordance preferences. We've already covered the General and Appearance settings. Today, we'll look at the Workspace settings. The first three options all have to do with the look and behavior of workspace zones. The active zone in a workspace is highlighted with a certain color. You can change this color by choosing a new one from the pop-up menu labeled Active Zone Color. The next option lets you specify the maximum number of zones that can be opened in any given workspace. If you have a ...

April 11, 2013 - David Lang — When I was in college, I decided to take Greek and Hebrew at the same time. The Classics department didn't offer Biblical Greek, so I had to take Classical Greek with its dizzying array of paradigms and its wild-and-wooly approach to word order. By comparison, Biblical Hebrew was a breeze: there were only three "tenses," a relatively small vocabulary, and a relatively simple sentence structure (at least at first!). I left college with the firm conviction that Greek is a more difficult language than Hebrew. Then I went to seminary, where I ...

April 05, 2013 - David Lang — This is the third in a series of posts on Accordance preferences. We've already covered the General settings here and here. Today, we'll look at the Appearance settings. The Appearance preferences present you with a number of broad ways you can change the look of Accordance. While this is not the place to go to change the font used in your various texts and tools (click Text Display or Tool Display for that), Appearance is the place to go when you want to make more fundamental changes, such as the maximum width of a line of text or how ...

March 29, 2013 - David Lang — This is the second in a series of posts on Accordance preferences. Yesterday we covered some of the General settings. Today, we'll cover the rest of them. In addition to letting you choose how you want Accordance to start up and what information dialogs you want to have displayed, the General settings let you tweak Accordance's amplify behavior. When you select a word or verse reference in Accordance, you can then choose to search for that selected text in any Accordance resource. This is the process we call amplifying. For example, ...

March 28, 2013 - David Lang — This past weekend, I taught Accordance training seminars in Washington DC and Williamsburg, Virginia. Both groups included some pretty experienced Accordance users, and their questions prompted me to cover some more in depth aspects of Accordance than I usually get to. One thing I noticed in answering those questions was how much I turned to the Preferences panel. Over the past two decades of development, we've added numerous options you can set in order to tailor Accordance to your specific needs. Most of them can be found by choosing ...

March 25, 2013 - Darin Allen — I remember diligently studying Greek paradigms one day in seminary when I asked my professor, “Is this how we’re going to be studying Greek after we graduate?” He just laughed and said, “Nah, you’ll be using Bible software.” How true. In reflecting on his words, I’ve also noticed an interesting trend now that I’ve been out of seminary for a few years. Many of my friends and colleagues who bought Bible software in seminary are still using it to access the original languages today as pastors and ministry leaders. Granted, ...

March 20, 2013 - Darin Allen — We are excited to announce another round of new releases! These new releases are all on sale as introductory specials through April 2, 2013, so be sure to pick them up now! Lenski’s Commentary on the New Testament R.C.H. Lenski’s 20-volume Commentary on the New Testament is praised for the way it throughly handles interpretive issues while applying thoughtful exegesis. Written from a conservative Lutheran perspective, Lenski’s commentary is in-depth and exhaustive, discussing various ways that a passage could be ...

March 14, 2013 - Darin Allen — If you haven’t heard the news, Accordance is having an exciting giveaway right now. The Grand Prize winner will receive an iPad Mini along with the Accordance 10 Essential Collection. The idea is to provide the winner with a complete mobile Bible study solution. The iPad Mini is a great tablet in this regard, as it’s large enough to accommodate serious Bible study but small enough (and light enough) to hold in one hand during long reading sessions. Its size and weight make it a great tablet for reading and searching your Accordance modules ...

March 08, 2013 - David Lang — As I mentioned yesterday, I'm teaching my family Greek using Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek grammar. We're now at the point where they're learning to parse first and second declension nouns, and Mounce suggests that we do so by naming the case first, followed by the number, and then the gender. That is different from the default order in Accordance. If you hover over a noun and look at the Instant Details, you'll see the parsing listed by gender, then number, then case. In order to avoid the confusion that might be caused by these ...

March 07, 2013 - David Lang — As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been teaching my family Greek using Accordance and an Apple TV. We're now learning noun case endings and beginning all those initially bewildering processes like parsing words, identifying their lexical forms, etc. As an illustration, I decided to show how Accordance makes all that stuff easy. I began by hovering my mouse over a word in the Greek New Testament to show how its lexical form and parsing is automatically displayed in the instant details box. I then triple-clicked a word to show how ...